Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => COVID-19 => Topic started by: acsinuk on 18/07/2024 19:03:44
-
The latest government report into the damage the covid pandemic did to people blames the government for being unprepared. Who can ever be??
The problem was the NHS and government panicked and totally over reacted to the declaration from World Health Organisations [WHO] advice that a pandemic was about to hit the world.
It turned out that the pandemic did not kill 20% of the world population as expected and even before any vaccines were available only 11 in 4500 people on the Diamond Cruise Ship died due to the covid
Months before vaccines were available this statistic was known only 3 in a thousand would succumb and these were mostly elderly passengers.
To blame is WHO for not having advised everyone that this was just a new flu virus and quell the media hype that was exaggerating the pandemic out of all proportion and panicking politicians into pointless lockdowns and economic turmoil.
Misrepresentation by NHS by sighting all cause of death as pandemic caused if the person died within 28 days of contacting covid also muddied the stats.
-
In the early stages no one knew how bad this disease would be but they had data from two previous new coronavirus infections, SARS and MERS. On this basis the lockdowns were entirely appropriate with caution being a priority. There was serious danger that the health system would have been overwhelmed if the virus had been let rip through the population. In addition to the quoted fatalities don't forget the "long covid " sufferers, there are thousands of people whose lives have been severely disrupted and this seems to be most associated with the initial variant.
-
The UK government clearly had no plan to deal with an entirely controllable disease and preferred to ignore best advice, play political games, and award massive contracts to Party donors and relatives.
The British Isles are free of rabies because we impose absolute quarantine on incoming animals of other species, so why not do the same for humans who may be carrying a nasty transmissible disease with a short incubation period?
-
The UK government clearly had no plan to deal with an entirely controllable disease and preferred to ignore best advice, play political games, and award massive contracts to Party donors and relatives.
The British Isles are free of rabies because we impose absolute quarantine on incoming animals of other species, so why not do the same for humans who may be carrying a nasty transmissible disease with a short incubation period?
There are always lethal diseases, delending on your viewpoint. Cancer patients, transplant patients are shielding even now, but the rest of the world doesnt give a toss this time.
-
Alan, with the extent of air travel I would reckon the virus was already in situ before any measures were activated. Even if not the case the virus could easily have hitched a ride across the English channel, as many other unwelcome visitors do.
-
The latest government report into the damage the covid pandemic did to people blames the government for being unprepared. Who can ever be??
The latest government report into the damage the covid pandemic did to people blames the government for being unprepared. Who can ever be??
A government that hadn't thrown out the previous preparations because they hadn't used them and they were expensive to maintain.
"One event in 2016 called Exercise Cygnus identified worryingly large gaps in the response and plans were put in place to update those by 2018.
But that did not happen, and by June 2020 just eight of the 22 recommendations made after that exercise had been completed."
from
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy9472qxk1vo
It turned out that the pandemic did not kill 20% of the world population as expected
Had anyone expected that?
To blame is WHO for not having advised everyone that this was just a new flu virus
At times, Covid was the single biggest cause of deaths in the UK.
It outpaced road deaths, cancer, heart failure etc.
Are you saying that, since they were killing fewer than what you falsely describe as "a new flu virus" we should stop taking action to reduce those deaths?
Essentially, you don't seem to understand the facts.
The UK government clearly had no plan to deal with an entirely controllable disease and preferred to ignore best advice, play political games, and award massive contracts to Party donors and relatives.
The British Isles are free of rabies because we impose absolute quarantine on incoming animals of other species, so why not do the same for humans who may be carrying a nasty transmissible disease with a short incubation period?
Why not indeed?
In the "post brexit" world where we had "take3n back control", we could have, at least restricted or quarantined people coming from places where there were particularly virulent new strains.
Except that one such place was India, and Boris couldn't take those actions because it would cripple the negotiations of a trade deal with one of the few big markets that was still prepared to talk to us.
Of course that's not teh only problem with Boris.
How many other countries had a leader who bragged about going round a hospital shaking hands with patients?
-
Alan, with the extent of air travel I would reckon the virus was already in situ before any measures were activated. Even if not the case the virus could easily have hitched a ride across the English channel, as many other unwelcome visitors do.
That's a poor reason to keep on importing it...
-
The UK government clearly had no plan to deal with an entirely controllable disease and preferred to ignore best advice, play political games, and award massive contracts to Party donors and relatives.
The British Isles are free of rabies because we impose absolute quarantine on incoming animals of other species, so why not do the same for humans who may be carrying a nasty transmissible disease with a short incubation period?
There are always lethal diseases, delending on your viewpoint. Cancer patients, transplant patients are shielding even now, but the rest of the world doesnt give a toss this time.
Holy cow!
PC has actually said something very sensible.
-
BC, with a contagious respiratory virus spread by aerosol, the only way to stop it is total lockdown of all international transport and immediate internment of all irregulars(ie channel boat migrants) and even then this may fail as humans are not the only species affected. PS: lot of covid in Ireland right now, the boss, our eldest daughter and myself have had it in the last few weeks. I found it relatively mild this time(3rd) as opposed to the first which was dreadful.
-
BC, with a contagious respiratory virus spread by aerosol, the only way to stop it is total lockdown of all international transport and immediate internment of all irregulars(ie channel boat migrants) and even then this may fail as humans are not the only species affected. PS: lot of covid in Ireland right now, the boss, our eldest daughter and myself have had it in the last few weeks. I found it relatively mild this time(3rd) as opposed to the first which was dreadful.
Bht why stop it, flu is every year and is perilous to any one with athsma, yet not one crap is given. Covud panic is related to the numbers of ventilators avaliable not the numbers who will pass away. There is a problem of painting one self in to a corner. If one has a vaccine to keep one self alive in the absence of such vaccine, one must consider ones own health. If vaccines where actually deleterious (an extra sylablye in that word for my appreciation) to the under 18s, about middleing to the 18-45 bracket, and beneficial to those over (Boris Johnson, Dond Trump), one has to think that the under 45 who where not vulnerable where unduly put upon (providing that they behaved accordingly)
It will happen again no doubt, we have a population that has been sustained via medical intervention (parents siblings children nieces nephews grand children neighbours friends) and without a vaccine become vunerable. Lockdowns are fine as long as the the country keeps going and opportunities are not lost. You cannot punish the young for your position though.
-
Yes flu is an annual occurrence but we have a reasonably good handle on it with updated vaccines every year- not saying that it might not catch us out. Covid was new and the last new coronavirus to come out of asia was SARS which was a very serious infection that was brought under control, fortunately. Covid could easily have been as bad as SARS or worse but we did not know at the time. Don't forget it killed the doctor who got in trouble for publicising it. Do you remember the situation in the north of Italy with refrigerated trucks outside the hospitals when the morgues were overflowing? That was the scenario that the lockdowns were intended to prevent. I don't believe there is any evidence that the vaccines were harmful to certain age groups. All medications, including vaccines, have a certain risk associated with their use. A decision to medicate is always based on a benefit to risk assessment. A new pandemic is almost certain to happen, given the size of the world population together with the extent of air transport. I think the greatest risk is probably bird flu and it could be as bad as the Spanish flu or worse.
-
Problem with excepting children from a national quarantine is that whilst they may not die from the disease, they can certainly carry it and transmit it to their elders.
The psychological problem arises from saying "lockdown", with its connotations of prison riots and punitive restriction of movement, when you mean "quarantine" - a well-tried and entirely sensible means of limiting the spread of an infectious disease.
-
Even if not the case the virus could easily have hitched a ride across the English channel, as many other unwelcome visitors do.
Not likely. The only vector in Europe is humans, and it is very easy to prevent them crossing the Channel. These islands were not invaded between 1066 and 2000.
The first cases in the UK were air travellers from China, who arrived 3 months after the epidemic had been recognised there and publicised worldwide.
-
Yet no one has been able to stop the boats despite saying they would.
-
Yes flu is an annual occurrence but we have a reasonably good handle on it with updated vaccines every year- not saying that it might not catch us out. Covid was new and the last new coronavirus to come out of asia was SARS which was a very serious infection that was brought under control, fortunately. Covid could easily have been as bad as SARS or worse but we did not know at the time. Don't forget it killed the doctor who got in trouble for publicising it. Do you remember the situation in the north of Italy with refrigerated trucks outside the hospitals when the morgues were overflowing? That was the scenario that the lockdowns were intended to prevent. I don't believe there is any evidence that the vaccines were harmful to certain age groups. All medications, including vaccines, have a certain risk associated with their use. A decision to medicate is always based on a benefit to risk assessment. A new pandemic is almost certain to happen, given the size of the world population together with the extent of air transport. I think the greatest risk is probably bird flu and it could be as bad as the Spanish flu or worse.
They where always planning for a flu they didnt have a vaccine for, it is the big worry, but the threshold for panic is lowered with the more medically sustained people we have, and the more you sustain a polulace the greater the polulace is. I doubt covid would have been noticed if we didnt have a flu vaccine maintaining the populace prior too.
We also had the refrigirated containers in the uk and mass burials in the usa.
-
BC, with a contagious respiratory virus spread by aerosol, the only way to stop it is total lockdown...
Do you realise that, while stopping it wasn't practical, restricting it was?
But they didn't, because a moron was in charge and didn't even turn up at meetings.
Makes you wonder what policies got that moron elected.
-
Yet no one has been able to stop the boats despite saying they would.
They said they would.
They were lying.
It wasn't in their interests to do it.
-
Hi BC, there is a bit of crossfire going on here. My remarks about the inability of totally keeping the virus out were principally in response to Alan's suggestion to do something akin to how we have kept the British isles free of rabies. Given the impossibility of such a plan I agree fully that all we could do was restrict, restrict, restrict. Boris+covid was a dire scenario to afflict the British though we had some severe missteps here: it was decided that the populace deserved a "meaningful Christmas" and the lockdown was lifted with a quick U-turn when the hospitals were flooded with icu facilities stretched to almost breaking point. Alan objects to the "lockdown" term, we could instead "lockup".
-
Makes you wonder what policies got that moron elected.
The chief Tory moron is elected by 80,000 paid-up members of the Party, on the basis of whatever he/she has apparently promised them, so the answer is "tax cuts".
-
A previous administration was able to prevent an armed invasion (Operation Sealion) by the world's most efficient military force that had successfully invaded the rest of Europe.
I was intercepted in 1975 when sailing a registered yacht flying a British flag, which was boarded and searched for illegal immigrants, any of whom would have been immediately imprisoned along with the crew.
You need to start by taking the threat seriously and committing and equipping the Coastguard to do its job.
-
don't forget the "long covid " sufferers, there are thousands of people whose lives have been severely disrupted
Only thousands? This neuroscientist who specialises in Long Covid says the figure may be as high as 10 million, and that we have no way of knowing because the data isn't being recorded adequately.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1814824165272080546.html
-
Could well be correct. I just wanted to raise the subject and did not intend to limit to "thousands".
-
The whole point is pandemics can kill millions which could be a good thing for our planet which is overheating due to the population explosion in North Africa/middle east.
Let God sort pandemics out not NHS pseudo experts with uneconomic lockdowns while science develop a vaccine; the alternative is wars over water rights and religious squabbles all scary alternatives.
Politicians should not react just procrastinate and wringing their hands about such large families making it impossible for their economies to keep up with building homes and infrastructure but leave it to our Creator to solve the problem
-
the population explosion in North Africa/middle east.
Population growth is fixed, the increase in births has already ceased, and the remaining increase in total population is just what's already baked into the system as today's children grow up and have children of their own.
-
Let God sort pandemics out
You are on the wrong web site.
-
A previous administration was able to prevent an armed invasion (Operation Sealion) by the world's most efficient military force that had successfully invaded the rest of Europe.
I was intercepted in 1975 when sailing a registered yacht flying a British flag, which was boarded and searched for illegal immigrants, any of whom would have been immediately imprisoned along with the crew.
You need to start by taking the threat seriously and committing and equipping the Coastguard to do its job.
It would be better if people stopped conflating "illegal immigrants" with asylum seekers at every opportunity.
-
You are an illegal immigrant unless and until you have been granted asylum, unless you have been offered refugee status before arriving.
Very few people would automatically qualify from asylum if they have arrived from France. IIRC the Revolution was over 200 years ago and refugees from the Nazis mostly returned to France in the late 1940s.
Not that any of this is relevant to the question! COVID was imported to the UK by legitimate and documented travellers, roughly half UK residents and half visitors on business or vacation.
-
You are an illegal immigrant unless and until you have been granted asylum, unless you have been offered refugee status before arriving.
Very few people would automatically qualify from asylum if they have arrived from France. IIRC the Revolution was over 200 years ago and refugees from the Nazis mostly returned to France in the late 1940s.
Not that any of this is relevant to the question! COVID was imported to the UK by legitimate and documented travellers, roughly half UK residents and half visitors on business or vacation.
A good joke is that 2 jewish holocaust refugees moved to the U.K. in 1939 after suffering merciless persecution for 12 years in Germany, narrowly avoiding death in the concentration camps, losing all their posessions. They where housed in Glasgow. 6 years later, as soon as the war was over they moved back.
-
BC " They where housed in Glasgow. 6 years later, as soon as the war was over they moved back."
But refugees in camps in the Sahara would move back to what? A burnt out village robbed of all food and seeds??
7 millions in the camps already but what is their future??? How can we absorb millions of out of work children and teenagers looking for work and a way to advance their society and country????
-
But refugees in camps in the Sahara
You seem to be the only one to mention the Sahara.
WTF are you talking about?
-
We are talking about world over population that is causing global warming and millions of child refugees!!!
Simple answer is limit families to 2.1 children so they inherit parents house thus limit building to improvements only.
Free contraception supplied by do-gooder charities. WHO, red cross, docs without borders, red crescent etc.
-
I think you have put the cart before the horse but the underlying suggestion of population control is sound.
Climate change is inevitable, human population isn't. For the foreseeable future (about the next 500 years) the world will be unable to sustain the present human population at an acceptable standard of living. If the population doesn't decrease, there will be increasing numbers of people needing to migrate because their homeland is uninhabitable, and plenty more wishing to migrate because the grass is (literally) greener somewhere else and transport is cheap. Where the climate is presently tolerable, the standard of living is almost wholly dependent on fossil fuels, of which the supply is limited and mostly controlled by theocracies and other unpleasant dictatorships.
Limiting reproduction to one child would reduce the population to an indefinitely sustainable level within 100 years.
-
Free contraception supplied by do-gooder charities. WHO, red cross, docs without borders, red crescent etc.
Yes, it is.
I was not sure about Red Crescent, so I checked.
https://www.ifrc.org/sites/default/files/IFRC_CIC_Guidelines_EN_20200212_Web.pdf
But you also have to ensure that you provide retirement/ old-age pensions.
Because, for a lot of people their only hope for being looked after when they are old is their children.
While that's the case, they have a clear incentive to have lots of children.
-
The frequent misconception is that children work for pensioners. Grandchildren don't!
In developed countries (and the USA) the under-20's mostly do not pay any taxes and are a financial burden on the state and their parents. State pensions are paid by the taxed 20 - 60 cohort, the "Working Fraction" which accounts for about 50% of the population, with roughly 25% in each of the 0 - 20 and 60 - 100 cohorts. The WF is also responsible for the economic activity that funds private pensions.
If the birthrate decreases below replacement level, the WF actually increases and the tax burden decreases, so there is more money available to pay pensions and more people (from the WF) available to support the elderly since fewer are involved in child care and education.
The only people who suffer from a decreasing population are the parasites whose incomes depend on economic expansion and a shortage of resources.
-
I agree, our two daughters are still a financial drain to some extent but less than in the past. The younger one(36) is almost independent but the older one(38) is a disaster: she is extremely gifted in many ways but totally impractical in day to day planning and organisation and I doubt she will ever be capable of independent living. Fortunately neither have produced any sprogs, yet.
-
Also worth considering less complex societies.
Historically, subsistence agriculture required a pyramidal family, with 5-year-olds herding animals and teenagers clearing forest and ploughing fields, but the pyramid was assured by a life expectancy of about 20 years so only about one in ten would survive to effective retirement at age 50. Thanks to medicine and civil engineering, that life expectancy has more than doubled in the last 100 years and the pyramid looks more like a trapezoid, with the same amount of land, rain and sun supporting three times the population - except that the climate has changed, and there is no more land.
-
Also worth considering less complex societies.
Historically, subsistence agriculture required a pyramidal family, with 5-year-olds herding animals and teenagers clearing forest and ploughing fields, but the pyramid was assured by a life expectancy of about 20 years so only about one in ten would survive to effective retirement at age 50. Thanks to medicine and civil engineering, that life expectancy has more than doubled in the last 100 years and the pyramid looks more like a trapezoid, with the same amount of land, rain and sun supporting three times the population - except that the climate has changed, and there is no more land.
Funny fact that the biggest factor in birth control in history has been poor health, if you married at 15 that would give you at least 20 pregnancies, infertility was rife and many pregnancies did not run to term . Add to that the high level of infant and child mortality
-
Gosh; My apologies to BC and you all as you correctly guessed I thought I was replying to the Environmental forum question of link between population expansion and global warming. So sorry.
Anyhow, I agree with all the above comments but recommend charities major objective be family planning free aids, rather than food, health and medical care; particularly as with modern mechanisation a farmer with a tractor no longer needs a large family but as a responsible parent should ensure that his kids find a job to assist the community and a home to inherit in the future.
-
It's difficult enough to forecast the weather for next week's harvest. How is a farmer expected to predict the job market 20 years down the line? And if the kids inherit the farmhouse, hasn't that rather restricted their choice of career?
-
The frequent misconception is that children work for pensioners. Grandchildren don't!
In developed countries (and the USA) the under-20's mostly do not pay any taxes and are a financial burden on the state and their parents. State pensions are paid by the taxed 20 - 60 cohort, the "Working Fraction" which accounts for about 50% of the population, with roughly 25% in each of the 0 - 20 and 60 - 100 cohorts. The WF is also responsible for the economic activity that funds private pensions.
If the birthrate decreases below replacement level, the WF actually increases and the tax burden decreases, so there is more money available to pay pensions and more people (from the WF) available to support the elderly since fewer are involved in child care and education.
The only people who suffer from a decreasing population are the parasites whose incomes depend on economic expansion and a shortage of resources.
You forgot to say " WF actually increases and the tax burden decreases... for a while"
OK, just to make the maths easy, we can consider the case where the birth rate drops to zero.
For simplicity, we can say everyone retires at 60.
Broadly the same thing happens regardless of the distribution of retirement ages.
What happens over the period from 20 years to 59 years and 364 days later?
The WF drops to zero near zero.
And that one day's worth of people (due to retire "tomorrow") have to support the entire retired population. They will be paying several thousand percent tax to do it.
And the next day, the elderly have to look after themselves.
From the planet's PoV that might be a good thing.
-
Gosh; My apologies to BC and you all as you correctly guessed I thought I was replying to the Environmental forum question of link between population expansion and global warming. So sorry.
Anyhow, I agree with all the above comments but recommend charities major objective be family planning free aids, rather than food, health and medical care; particularly as with modern mechanisation a farmer with a tractor no longer needs a large family but as a responsible parent should ensure that his kids find a job to assist the community and a home to inherit in the future.
I deduce that you have never been starving through no fault of your own.
-
just to make the maths easy, we can consider the case where the birth rate drops to zero.
It makes the maths easy, but you are now answering a completely different question. You could also ask what would happen if every female had 3 surviving children?
It's surely better to start with an objective and work out how to achieve it. My objective is to reach a UK population that is sustainable at the present standard of living or better, for as long as the sun shines.
If you project the one-child policy for 100 years, you end up with a sustainable population with 5 times the per capita resources than at the beginning, and an improved quality of life for all (except bankers and builders) throughout that century.
Reverting to 2.1 children at any time will produce a stable state where everyone is better off than at present.
The good news is that the UK is currently running at about 1.6, so there is some hope that subsequent generations won't starve or freeze.
-
If you project the one-child policy for 100 years,
What about a 1.1 child policy or 0.8?
(On average... obviously)
-
Reverting to 2.1 children at any time will produce a stable state where everyone is better off than at present.
Is that an admission Alan? (Providing you are not envisioning getting rid of pensions or pensioners)
-
It's a statement of obvious fact. Both you and BC need to understand the difference between a journey and a destination.
There is no need to "get rid" of pensioners - nature takes care of that. The trick is just to not make babies that you can't feed.
If the climate-resilient route to a prosperous and indefinitely sustainable society consists of doing nothing and spending nothing, why not try it?
-
What about a 1.1 child policy or 0.8?
Slight problem of enforcing or even encouraging women to bear fractional children. My plan is to
remove all child benefits
give every woman ?500 every 6 months if she isn't pregnant
except for the first pregnancy that results in a child who survives to, say, age 16.
The UK government has already moved oin the right direction.
-
The problem was the NHS and government panicked and totally over reacted to the declaration from World Health Organisations [WHO] advice that a pandemic was about to hit the world.
only 11 in 4500 people on the Diamond Cruise Ship died due to the covid
.
To blame is WHO for not having advised everyone that this was just a new flu virus and quell the media hype that was exaggerating the pandemic out of all proportion and panicking politicians into pointless lockdowns and economic turmoil.
The WHO did not initiate panic. In fact by its existing definition it would have had to declare a global pandemic almost a month before it did. It delayed by redefining a global pandemic. It was still playing down Covid when the first lockdowns were instigated.
According to Wikipeodia 2% of those infected on Diamond cruise ship died. 2% of the Uk population is around 1.5 million people.Those who died on the ship were all, I think elderly, so obviously that doesn't translate to 1.5 million expected deaths in the UK but at the time there was sensible concern that under fives would would also be vulnerable.
The WHO don't come out of this well but I think the appalling modelling was probably more responsible for over reaction. Without lockdown the first wave would have peaked higher but probably not much higher. Hospitals would have been refusing admission (I am told the plan would have been an age bar, the oldest being the unlucky ones), Oxygen treatment would have been rationed and intensive care beds unavailable.
That said the claim that we could achieve herd immunity and the denial that were many people being re-infected in the alpha wave were bigger mistakes. The alpha variant evolved to evade immunity (the mutations were even predicted ahead of time as immune evasive). Immune evasion is only an evolutionary advantage when the virus is re-infecting previously infected individuals, but all sources were saying re-infection was rare at the time, ie the second half of 2020.
-
Slight problem of enforcing or even encouraging women to bear fractional children.
I'm sorry you didn't understand what I said.
(On average... obviously)
Women do, currently have fractional children on average.
Now, please answer the question.
-
Both you and BC need to understand the difference between a journey and a destination.
I pointed out the destination.
What happens over the period from 20 years to 59 years and 364 days later?
The WF drops to zero near zero.
And that one day's worth of people (due to retire "tomorrow") have to support the entire retired population. They will be paying several thousand percent tax to do it.
And the next day, the elderly have to look after themselves.
-
According to Wikipeodia 2% of those infected on Diamond cruise ship died. 2% of the Uk population is around 1.5 million people.
90 percent of people on the ship where over 50.That said the claim that we could achieve herd immunity and the denial that were many people being re-infected in the alpha wave were bigger mistakes.
Yes, the vaccines did absolutley bugger all for herd immunity, not sure what effect prior infection had, but my mom has had corona twice since recieving a "vaccine".
-
Yes, the vaccines did absolutley bugger all for herd immunity,
It's important to remember what "herd immunity" means.
It means letting the virus run riot; what's left of the herd will be immune.
If you are susceptible that's just hard luck. If you are lucky you might get a place in hospital and if not, you get a half day appointment with the undertaker.
The point of the vaccine was to reduce mortality and infectivity.
Which of those do you think is a bad thing?
We all accept that it wasn't perfect- things generally aren't.
-
Hi BC, I think you have an error: i'm sure you meant to say "the vaccine reduced mortality and infectivity".
-
90 percent of people on the ship where over 50.
As are about 30% of the UK population, so expect at least 500,000 excess deaths if you do nothing. Pretty much what happened, proportionally, in the early stages.
-
Yes, the vaccines did absolutley bugger all for herd immunity,
Because vaccination is preventive - exactly the opposite of primary herd immunity. Secondary population resilience occurs when you have vaccinated enough people that the R value falls below 1.
-
Yes, the vaccines did absolutley bugger all for herd immunity,
Because vaccination is preventive
Which corona vaccination was preventative for infection?
-
All of them. None 100% - vaccination doesn't work like that - and some better than others, but any was better than none.
Quarantine is the only guaranteed way of preventing a transmissible disease becoming a pandemic, but humans are more stupid than a virus.
-
Which corona vaccination was preventative for infection?
All of them. None 100%
Preventative does usually mean to stop, the measles vaccine does this with enough coverage . Would you say it did 50 percent immunisation, if so with a rate of 90 percent inoculation a virus like corona it was still possible?
-
BS, my friend. We have a Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, and one for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. A fair bit of the police force and of the fire brigade is devoted to prevention, and whatever is left of the school nurse service teaches preventive medicine, but sh1t still happens. As, alas, does measles.
The only 100% effective vaccination program to date was against smallpox, but it took 70 years and very stringent worldwide quarantine laws to achieve that result.
-
90 percent of people on the ship where over 50.
As are about 30% of the UK population, so expect at least 500,000 excess deaths if you do nothing. Pretty much what happened, proportionally, in the early stages.
:)
-
Yes, the vaccines did absolutley bugger all for herd immunity,
Because vaccination is preventive - exactly the opposite of primary herd immunity. Secondary population resilience occurs when you have vaccinated enough people that the R value falls below 1.
I don't think so. Vaccines to other diseases can achieve herd immunity. Corona viruses (and flu for that matter) has a life cycle which involves mutating and re-infecting hosts which is the reason why vaccines cannot induce herd immunity.
-
It is down to whether one is dealing with a DNA or RNA virus. DNA viruses, for example smallpox, are much more stable than RNA viruses such as influenza and covid. RNA viruses are prone to antigenic drift where small changes occur over time and antigenic shifts which involve where large changes rapidly occur. I was vaccinated against smallpox ~1960 and the consensus is that I would still have a degree of protection. Given that the vaccination was so effective one might wonder why it took so long for eradication- the answer is down to the fact that smallpox is wildly contagious.